On Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Moldova through Politics of Second World War Commemoration (Research Proposal)

The research will engage with issues of search for “knowledge and truth” in changed historical contexts, the importance of public struggle over the meanings and interpretations of the Soviet past and mechanisms of “coming to terms with the past” through national histories. At the empirical level it will focus on how the Second World War history was used in state legitimization and search for national unifying narratives in post-Soviet Moldova. It will be shown that the search for a national identity in Moldova following the independence in 1991 has been reflected, among others, in the struggles over the interpretations of the Soviet past. Lacking a pre-socialist cultural memory, the Moldovan society sought to transform the Soviet past into “usable national history”, aiming to focus and mobilize public opinion, driven from the necessity to transmit a sense of continuity and coherence through meaningful historical contexts, in our particular case being Second World War commemorations.

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On Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Moldova through Politics of Second World War Commemoration (Research Proposal)